State of the art vehicle automation presently enables some autonomous vehicles to operate in a substantially and/or fully autonomous state. An ability of such autonomous vehicles to operate effectively and safely in busy or active environments often relies on an ability of the autonomous agent to observe its operating environment and make operating decisions that enables the autonomous agent to achieve a routing or traveling goal in a safe manner.
To achieve safe autonomous operation, autonomous vehicles may be configured with many sensors, sources of compute, sources of power and actuators that operate together to enable the autonomous vehicle to perceive and comprehend its environment and further, compute decisions and controls that optimizes how safely that the autonomous vehicle traverses the environment.
However, many state of the art vehicle automation systems or practices may be designed to enable a relatively safe operation of an autonomous vehicle based on an assumption that all devices, components, and/or processes for operating the autonomous vehicle are not in a non-nominal or a diminished state.
Thus, there is a need in the vehicle automation field for systems and method for operating an autonomous vehicle safely when one or more devices, processes, and the like associated with the autonomous vehicle may be failed or have failed to some degree. The embodiments of the present application described herein provide technical solutions that address, at least, the need described above.